Well, I finally got around to upgrading this blog to WordPress 1.5 after a brief unsuccessful dalliance with Textpattern.
A few things are broken depending on how well a particular plugin does or doesn’t work with the upgrade and category listings are screwed but other than that its was pretty smooth and easy.
Its aggravating to say the least but thats life – I’m not going to be able to get an issue out this month. I’ve just got too much going on with a heavily pregnant wife, a major redesign project at work, a major uncompleted redesign of this site and Megan not sleeping so well at the moment. I’ve got two articles about 70% complete but thats about it.
Actually thinking about the project itself I seem (as Dave Shea pointed out) to have strayed away from the overall aim of web standards. Although I have mentioned them, they seem to be the most undiscussed part of the project!
To that end, I’m going to call the current project, Project: New Part I. Where Part I turns out to have been a look at processes and organisation, Part II will concentrate exclusively on code. I can even envisage a Part III in a far distant future where I look at serverside scripting for designers.
That should keep me nicely busy and harrassed for the next year or so.
Big news today – Adobe formally announce the purchase of Macromedia.
I have mixed feelings about this. Adobe were obviously being hurt by sales of Flash (Live Motion was a terrible product) and Dreamweaver but most of all Fireworks. I suspect that we’ll see the best bits of Fireworks and Freehand being assimilated into Photoshop and Illustrator respectively and the rest of each app quietly dumped. Go Live will probably resurface with an uncanny resemblance to Dreamweaver in a few months.
It’s Flash where the genuine interest lies. Far and away Macromedias most sucessful product – will Adobe be tempted to tinker with their new golden egg or be content to let it lie? And what about future development? Will Adobe be keeping the Actionscript team together? Most importantly of all – does this help or hinder competition and innovative software development?
Mr Schafer’s continuing campaign to drive a wedge between classic (Kanners) autism and Aspergers Syndrome continues apace. However, those of us who are afficionado’s of Mr Schafers note an increasing use of modified language coupled with more disingenuous ploys. In his latest report he says (and remember the overall goal here is discrediting the link between AS and Kanners autism):
Presently, anyone with a mental disorder can label themselves as “autistic”, presumably to avoid whatever stigma attached to their actual particular diagnosis. Who is to know otherwise who is really autistic? The differential diagnoses in these areas can be quite difficult for the experts (let alone for any amateur.)
Which is all very true but why is he saying it? I could call myself an elephant if I wish but it doesn’t make me one. The ‘who is to know who is really autistic’ line is patently a dig at the autistics who have challenged Mr Schafer but who have refused to publish their private medical diagnosis’ on the internet for his personal approval. Yes, anyone can call themselves autistic and I’ve no doubt that some who claim autism aren’t really autistic, just as some who claim some kind of expert knowledge on diagnostic criteria are also patently inexpert, but really there are bad apples everywhere in every social setting. Attempting to write off an entire section of society as part of a group of decievers is as facile as it is incorrect.
We are starting to witness ugly sociopath and sometimes violent behavior from people who claim to be “autistic”. They display behaviors that have little similarity to any disorder on the spectrum, Asperger’s or autism. The immediate source of concern from myself and other parents over the proper use of spectrum labels is our witnessingn of some of these self-diagnosed “autistics” banding together for political advocacy.
Sounds scary huh? Well, maybe it would if it was representative. First Mr Schafer rolls out his patented ‘Remote Diagnostic’ machine and decides everyone is sociopathic. He then immediately links that very emotive, intimidating and wrongly used word with a group of people who, at worst, disagree with him. I’m in no doubt that Mr Schafer has been on the recieving end of some threats and abuse by some people – some of whom may be autistic, some of whom may not – but the point is this: Mr Schafer is blatantly and quite shamefully attempting to make political gain out of this by associating this almost certainly tiny idiotic minority with the larger advocacy movement. He also interestingly makes a blanket statement regarding how ‘other parents’ are concerned. Well, I’m not. I think the autistics (and yes, Mr Schafer, they are, by every criteria you care to nuzzle at, autistic) have the spectrum labels pretty much spot on – as do every important autism researcher on the planet. The only people who don’t are the CAN/GR/MMR/Epidemic apologists who refute scientific evidence with their own increasingly irrelevant and error-strewn theories.
The thrust of their advocacy is to redefine autism as not being a disability, but rather a lifestyle that society should learn to accommodate and not treat or “fix”. They have already had some success at this in the media, to our horror.
A lifestyle? Deary me, Mr Schafer, if I were a lesser man I would feel myself getting quite annoyed at your patronising, wilfully ignorant stance. I’ve never spoken to any autistics either in person or online who have tried to promote their autism as a lifestyle choice. Yes, they promote acceptance – do you ever wonder why it is that you do not? Yes, they also turn away in horror at the idea of a cure. They are autistic, they are who they are and you want to find a way to stop them being who they are. I find it bewlidering that you can’t see that people would be upset by that – your attitude smacks of those who used to treat Emily Pankhursts supporters as insane and commit them.
I’m personally glad to witness the success they’ve had as it mirrors my own beliefs that society should be more tolerant and accepting of difference (the drive to eradicate what we don’t understand immediately is something I’d imagned long dead in the West’s colonial past) and I think your gross and I suspect deliberate misrepresentation of autism as a lifestyle choice and your further association of those who disagree with you as purveyors of that choice is arrogant, misrepresentative…and a little bit desperate.
No one had problems with anyone on the spectrum calling themselves “autistic” before these exploiters started to take advantage of our loose usage of the term. This is what is behind our fears. Their efforts to make everyone and themselves feel better about autism by redefining it innocuous will come at the expense of everyone on the spectrum
Yet again, more misrepresentation – I’ve never heard any autistic speak of autism as innocuous. A simple look at sites such as autistics.org reveal people who suffer greatly with some of their comorbid conditions or whos autism has led them through struggles that would reduce Mr Schafer to well, maybe appreciate their view a little more? Yet, they refuse to be defined by their struggles and wish to be proud of who they are. They don’t wish to make other autistics feel better by redefining it as innocuous, they wish to make other autistics feel better by standing up and being heard in the face of what is becoming an increasingly desperate and deliberate demonisation and belittling by people who know they are losing the argument.
That Megan likes this week –
One of the points I didn’t make about web design processes in a recent post was the concept known as designing by proxy.
Basically, this process starts when your client starts to dictate design decisions to you based on what s/he likes. Sounds a bit simplistic and I’ll be the first to admit it makes me sound like a prissy primadonna but I do wonder sometimes why clients actually hire a designer at all when what they really seem to want is a site builder.
A designer to me is someone who takes a set of business goals and finds a solution that meets the users goals – i.e. the business has a goal of getting 10% of all sales via their website. Its now my job as a designer to meet those business goals and the way I do that is to meet the needs of the clients customers. If I start to put the clients explicit branding needs first (in other words if I start to do it so to him it ‘looks nice’) then its been my experience that the design suffers and user needs are harder to meet and if users needs are harder to meet then the business goals will be next to impossible to meet.
This isn’t to say that its a designers job to make their clients unhappy but that a designer has a responsibility to his client and an equal (or maybe even greater) responsibility to his clients clients.
Does this mean I know better than my client? Well yes and no. At first, I don’t know my clients clients – in fact its part of my job to get to know these users but once I do know who they are then the design process begins and from that point on then I do know better than my client. Should he question? Of course. Should he dictate? No. Clients that dictate get exactly what they specify – a badly organised site that fails to meet the needs of their users.
The trouble of course, is that clients are decision-makers – they invariably hate having to hand control of even this one aspect of their business over to someone else. I’ve known clients who (after the process was over) have freely admitted they disagreed with design decisions not because they disagreed but mainly to try and let me know ‘whos boss’.
How to get past this has often been a major sticking point for me. I’ve never lost work because of it but I have walked away from jobs when the situation approached lunacy. I can’t believe I’m the only designer this happens to and so I was wondering – what do you do, how do you handle it? Are there good strategies for dealing with this situation?
No, nothing to do with dodgy 90’s techno. I’ve been going through an intensive period of design concept iteration at my workplace over the last couple of weeks (translation: I’ve been knocking out designs for the company website) and have been thinking primarily in shape and colour during that process. Not unusual preoccupations for a designer I agree but its been awhile since I thought so purposefully and for such a long time about shape particularly. Its very easy to fall into the trap of ‘box’ when you’re a web designer so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been thinking about.
Well, not just squares. Rectangles too. Common associations with squares are the concepts of honesty, reliability, strength and trust. Think of books, magazines and newspapers – all rectangular in shape. Books have always been seen from ancient to modern times as conveyors of wisdom and truth – is that where the association came from I wonder? Or maybe it was the shape of our sturdy, reliable houses that built up the association.
Square shapes are particularly good for reinforcing familiar concepts in an abstract way and seperating off content in a direct way – look at my site design, the main section is two rectangles that even though they are borderless are obvious. One contains this text and the other contains the navigation to the right. I used these rectangles in a direct way to segregate distinct areas in this design but in an upcoming design (not this site) I’ll be using squares and rectangles to reinforce abstract concepts like honesty and reliability.
Action, dynamicism, movement and directional indicators are what triangles represent – they don’t have to move themselves but they are ideal for leading a users eye to where you want it to go. Maybe you have a sale on on an e-commerce site and want to subtely lead your visitors to it? In this instance, triangles are your friend.
Triangles are suggestive of a wide variety of things – fire, flags, arrows, pyramids (quite a religious concept that) depending on how you orientate them and/or how you place them but however you use them, they are pretty much always suggestive of action. Use triangles wisely. Too much and your poor users won’t know what to look at or where to go. Instead use triangles to path your visitors around a site or to indicate one item or show location.
Circles are like big hugs (awwwww), giving security, reassurance, a sense of infinity and protection. If you want to use them in a different way they can also be used to indicate movement (rolling or spinning).
Circles and organic circle based shapes (ovals etc) are very popular in logo design. Because circular shapes offer a sense of completeness, they offer good psychological trust to users.
In the redesign lifecycle I’m just completing we toyed with ovals a lot. Ovals are the one shape that are retained in both men and womens short term memory equally well. Coupled with their inherent traits of trust and security we thought they’d be very good for emphasising key areas of the design.
As it turned out we went for a more square based design, the feelings we wanted to convey had more to do with projecting a feeling of trust and reliability rather than the more nurturing, feminine circle.
These are the process points you won’t find discussed in any book on web design. No website discusses them and no-one admits to them out loud. If there was a panel which discussed them at SXSW or @Media2005, we would all go – but only to see who else turned up and then we would go to the pub and take the piss behind their backs, but we’d know…..we’d know….we’ve all been to these places.
It doesn’t matter where you work. Whether you work in a studio or an office or at home there will always, always be someone available to wander up behind you, stand there watching over your shoulder (over your shoulder dammit!) and then casually say something like: “You’re putting that image there are you?”…pause…”I see.”.
There aren’t words in the English language to describe how utterly annoying this is. Constructive criticism after the design concept is complete is both expected and gratefully recieved – but during?? This can have a disastrous effect on both the life of the fledgling design concept and your relationship with the person who dared to utter such foolishness in your presence. Unfortunately, the only real solution is to kill everyone else on the planet thus ensuring total silence until your muse has finished shitting. Of course the really, really irritating thing is that 90% of the time, they’re right. Bastards.
This is the crucial part of the process whereby the design concept is complete but you’re not yet ready to show it to your client. It needs to sit, unmolested, unlooked at (except by you once every few hours) to gestate. This gestation period can last anything from a few hours to a few days. No one knows why this is necessary. It just is.
Possibly related to point one, although you must never admit this to the perpetrator of point one. This usually occurs after you’ve had your graphics app open for an hour or two and you’ve aimlessley pushed a few uninspired pixels around in the rough shape of something or other, squinted at it, decided its not bad enough to be responsible for the outbreak of Cholera and tried to fit an actual design element into it. You then realise how totally shite it actually is. Its at this point that scenario one (see above) usually occurs.
This one’s more for relatively new designers. Us jaded cynical hacks are well used to over realistically charging clients. Its happened to us all though, whether as an agency worker with the sinking realisation the Studio Manager is about to kick your arse for failing to budget properly or as a one-person band realising that 6 concept revisions, 12 usability tests and full database makeup and multimedia launch isn’t going to fit into your £250 budget for the site. Whatever the scenario, the end result is the same: congrats dickhead – you just lost yourself a pile of cash.
So you get down to brass tacks with the client and ask their logo creators to send you all versions of the logo. This is a tense time. Its not unknown to find a gaggle of web designers (what is the correct term for a group of web designers?) gathered round a machine waiting for a hi-res logo from their new client to download so they can pass judgement on it. When it does, the first 10 seconds or so are critical – if its met with a hissed intake of breath, or sniggers or appalled silence you’re in trouble. Any other response can be taken as a good sign. It is traditional at this stage however that whatever the quality of the logo, if you are the designer working with this client you should bemoan your luck in getting such a hard logo/colourscheme/typeface to have to make something of. Your air should be – yes I’m a genius, yes I can make this work, but its going to be very, very tricky. Appreciate me more goddamit.
Otherwise known as Oxton Syndrome, this is where you may have encountered a repeat of point three (see above) a few times when suddenly your muse decides to crap on you in the middle of the night. You know you should jot down the main points and go back to sleep but you can almost hear your graphics app calling to you – nothing will do now except getting up and going to work. You will pay for this dilligence later on in the day when you fall asleep in the middle of the creative meeting with Nike.
This one’s a fun one. It usually manifests itself between submission of proposal and deposit payment. For a long time I was firmly convinced there was some sort of League of Potential Clients who’s rules included the edict: ‘Before giving the go-ahead, make your chosen designer sweat as long as is humanly possible.’ There are strict mathmatical rules that govern this point e.g. d = (p x Tsn) where d = duration of wait, p = phone calls made to client and Tsn = total scheduling nightmare. This can reach nightmare proportions when d* comes into play where ‘*’ represents the number of clients pulling this shit on you.
A key point of the design process. This point usually comes along just after you have impressed the client with your professionalism and they are on the point of getting you to take a brief. This point is particularly beloved of freelancers dependant on their ISP for their very survivial. General law is: the tighter the margin, the greater the chance of badly timed downtime.
You know what I’m talking about. The fun part was over a long time ago. All thats left now is fine tuning your CSS to work in every v3 browser ever made, finising off that 3D spinning logo device the client specially requested and arranging a cut-over date. In your head, you’ve already moved on except that stupid ‘contract’ thing you signed says otherwise. Bah.
Symptoms include but are not limited to thinking wistfully about redesigning personal sites.
This is the point at which you make a bargain in your head regarding how far you’re willing to compromise on a design. The clients Marketing Dept say your concept isn’t ‘whizz-bang’ enough and want to insert animated wavy flags on the home page to denote each language the site caters to, maybe a full size Flash intro with a hi-res photo of their headquarters in Cockfosters alpha tweening in and various other goodness. A large part of you wants to ask if they’re ‘for real’, or maybe if they could possibly ‘stop trying to physically hurt me’ but the other sneaky part of you says, damn, I really need this job – if I take it, I break even for the first time this year! Such is the Whore Point: the point at which you readily abandon your principles and sell your self. Don’t worry too much, it doesn’t have to go on your portfolio….but you’ll always know.
Anything you think I’ve missed? What other undocumented, undiscussed laws should be added?
Three years ago I was a web designer who didn’t care about web standards. I was part of the first wave of Flash designers that eschewed everything coming from usability and accessibility people. Web standards as a concept didn’t even register. The only markup I regularly produced was that necessary to embed and center my SWF files. My sites always got enthusiastic reviews and I was amongst the vanguard of Flash people pushing back the borders of Flash and serverside/db integration moderating on two large Flash communites on that subject.
Then, about three years ago all that changed. A couple of friends started to educate me in web standards and why they were important, how usability didn’t have to be boring and how accessibility should be a given, not an add-on. Of course it helped that I already had the process side of design pretty settled, I already knew how to hand code markup and above all it helped that CSS was just beginning to come into its own as a force to be reckoned with.
Why am I telling you this?
Well, firstly of course its to say ‘thanks’ to everyone who ever wrote an article I ‘got’ or produced a design that made me gasp but thats pretty much a given.
What its mostly for is to illustrate to people like Tommy Olson that their efforts are appreciated. Tommy recently wrote about how true XHTML was dead:
I thought that with education and information, and by leading by some sort of example, we would be able to weed out the worst problems together. Today I have to admit that I was wrong. XHTML 1 is dead. Lost. Beyond all salvation.
I’m not going to get into a ‘real’ XHTML vs tag soup debate, the article from Tommy is just an example. There are a few articles lately where in my opinion some dangerous assumptions are being made and these seem to be leading the hardcore standards people like Tommy some frustration (NB: I’m not suggesting a link between these two links except in a cursory way). Recently John wrote as part of a larger article that:
the project I am about to start is kinda being watched over by another, bigger, web development company; who, in not so many words, told me they think web standards pretty much suck (politics, ya gotta love ’em).
I said to John in his comments that this was a depressingly common view amongst web dev companies of a certain size and I believe it is. There are still plenty (by which I mean the majority) of companies out there who are like I was three years ago – they have no interest in web standards.
So we need standards zealots. We need people who get irate over what MIME type we serve our content as just as three years ago we needed people who got irate over where we placed our Home page link or whether we used tables for layout or any of those other things we now take for granted.
But standards zealots? You need to give us time :o) As designers first and foremost it takes us awhile to get to where you are but that doesn’t mean we’re not learning and taking things on board. This site (almost) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict but because I’m serving it as text/html its not ever going to be true XHTML and I appreciate the distinction and I appreciate why its important. My own CMS skills are not l33t enough yet to ensure that my visitors comments are valid XHTML strict so I can’t implement that yet but thanks to you guys I have learnt to write to that standard so that when I have raised my CMS writing/hacking skills I can do as you suggest.
Look at the example of me to see how well you are doing – one by one designers are getting there. Don’t give up on us yet, we really do need each other.
Left Brain Right Brain 
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